Messud is a capable enough writer; she excels at lengthy descriptive passages in which she does very good character work with very little action. She basically ignores the writer's missive to "show don't tell," but she held my interest better in these parts of the story than in the parts when things were happening, so go figure. The one problem with her descriptive writing is her parenthetical phrases, which tend to go on and on. I often had to go back to the beginning of the sentence and reread it a few times to make sure I put all the right pieces together. Whatever this says about my intelligence, it was distracting enough that I wish she didn't write that way. Here's a particularly bloated sentence by way of example: "As they each gingerly dismantled and consumed their fanciful dishes - in her case at least, a fancy that, Danielle thought but did not say, was less original and extraordinary than the restaurant's reputation and price had led her to expect, and therefore disappointing, as she had chosen the venue to impress - Danielle proceeded to explain that she had been taken with his use of the term, that she had, perhaps wrongly, heard in it a certain echo, the suggestion of an ethos that she thought might be found, to greater or lesser degrees, in certain other publications or presentations, and that she, in her producer's role, had thought to articulate into, well, a movement." Decipher that in one reading.
The story is fine and moves along at a decent clip. September 11th turns up toward the end, which I wasn't expecting and found a little off-putting - I think it's still a little early to pull that on people. If you're going to put that in your book/movie/whatever, it should be part of the original premise so people know it's coming. But my main gripe with this book is the characters. They are well-drawn but irredeemably awful people. I found very little to like or sympathize with in any of them, and it's tough to enjoy any story that doesn't have a character to root for. Even Bootie, who seemed to be the one Messud most wanted the reader to side with, commits an unambiguously selfish act in the end that ruined him for me. The problem with these characters, and this is where Messud's book fits very well within the cultural context, is that they are all these upper-middle class, bored, entitled people who think that they shouldn't have to work, or be committed to their relationships, or respect anyone at all.
Six characters trade off at the center of different chapters: Murray Thwaite, his sister Judy, her son Bootie, Murray's daughter Marina, and her best friends Danielle and Julius. Judy and Bootie (real name, Frederick) live in Watertown, New York, and Murray and the rest live in the city. Murry is a highly respected journalist and writer who often appears on television as a talking head, opining on various issues of the day. Bootie admires his uncle inordinately and, having dropped out of college because nobody there really cares about learning, he moves in with the Thwaites in the hope of being mentored by Murray. Predictably, he uncovers who Murray really is underneath the persona and is disillusioned and angry. It's a rite of passage to learn that the adults in your life aren't perfect, but Bootie's ignorance and subsequent reaction to what he finds are not believable; it mostly amounts to a lot of whining. Prior to his arrival in New York, he thinks about how "he could accept the trivial in his daily life, [but] Bootie felt he could do so only with the knowledge that the sacrifice had purpose: only a transcendental good could override the indignities." This isn't such an ignoble pursuit, but I'm weary of twenty-somethings who think they are the first ones in the world to try and resist the trappings of quotidian life. Maybe it's also a rite of passage to have those thoughts, but for someone on the other side of them it just feels a bit disingenuous.
The three friends are no better; Danielle winds up having an affair with Murray, and it's very hard to feel sorry for her when the affair comes to an end. Of course she is lonely and depressed, but she set herself up for it. Marina marries a truly appalling man named Ludovic Seeley, who does nothing but insult everyone around him and speak with obnoxious authority on every topic that comes up in conversation. And Julius spends the book sleeping around on his boyfriend, with no apparent motive other than the thrill of doing something wrong. After one of his trysts, Messud writes, "Julius felt not sated, nor guilty - opposing but mutually viable emotions. Rather, he felt sad, and tired. This, while no part of the fantasy, inevitably became the reality: because whatever he yearned for - and even to be able to name it might have quelled the yearning - seemed always destined to elude him." Well, yes. This is called life. One way in which you cope with it is by not constantly sabotaging your relationships in search of something you know you won't find. When I read a novel I want to like the characters well enough that I care about finishing their story, and that's not how I felt in this case.
The title of the book came very close to being very clever, but Messud didn't follow the thread far enough for it to be so. Marina is writing a book about children's clothes and how they reflect cultural mores, and it turns out to be terrible but she publishes it anyway. She titles it The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes, which is cute because ultimately people's motives for dressing their kids in a particular way tend to be about them, not the kids. So I have to respect the way Messud at least began to develop that theme, but ultimately these emperor's children were so self-involved that I couldn't care about what happened to them. I need a story to end with hope, and this one just ended with me feeling as though nobody had learned anything meaningful.
1 comment:
i read this a year or two ago and had very similar feelings about the characters. drove me nuts. i miss talking about books with you!
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